


phoenix

by saturmime



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-02
Updated: 2017-04-02
Packaged: 2018-10-13 21:04:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10521837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saturmime/pseuds/saturmime
Summary: another thing for class with the prompt "descent into insanity" which was REALLY cringey to try to write but also kind of wild and interesting? yeah i havent turned it in yet so if anyone wants to critique? ? ?





	

There was never any concept of time, not there. The light would come and then go. The plants would grow, then die, he’d fill up an ashtray, then dump it out, everything would restart, recycle, rebirth itself in an endless cycle centered at the feet of him.

The first time I looked at him and he looked back, he was in that dark little room, where he laid on the bed and stared up. There would be a melancholy about him, a lingering shine in his soft eyes, a trembling way about his breathing. He is someone to be protected, that’s all that you manage to think about when you see him, flat out and despairing over whatever might ail him at the moment - a lack of direction, the lack of a job, the lack of an ashtray into which he might tap out the last of his cigarette - all accumulated into one suffocating mass. You want to change that, even if you don’t quite know how.

Something flitted at the corner of his eye, a movement over the ceiling, a passing car casting a flash of light from the street just outside, perhaps. It was a fleeting feeling, to him, I thought, like his eyes might have played a trick, the film of tears over his pupils clouding his rationale as easily as any childhood fantasy.

The neighbor would come over when the light returned, and he would only then shed the despondence like a large coat, suddenly weightless on his feet and more free about the shoulders, a cherub, or a sprite, something cheerful and playful that a children’s book might offer to tender eyes. They would sit for a long time in front of the television, playing games and telling jokes and ever so often, like a car might be passing once more, his eyes would drift upwards, but, to his knowledge, no car would ever cast light in the daytime, and he soon forgot.

He was always a soft, simple creature, you realized this after a while of observance. He likes Van Gogh, and Kerouac, and using his potted plants as impromptu ashtrays when he’s too lazy to get up for his real one - but he’s also very strange. There was a wisdom in the way he began to observe the ceiling, as if he might find some forgotten knowledge in the jagged crack in the far corner, something he had only noticed quite recently, or some braillic code in the texture of the paint strokes. He became intrigued by it, not afraid, never afraid, but very much intrigued. He came home some days and would stand upright on the bed and reach his hand to the ceiling, but wouldn’t feel anything out of the ordinary, at least usually.

On days that he did feel something, he didn’t pull away. That might have been what ended up setting him apart, made him such an enigma among the other emotionally compromised and sensitive of his kind.

It almost seemed that he wanted to see, that is, that there would be comfort in the assurance of his own instability. The day he came into the room after a long, loud conversation behind the door, he smiled and laughed up at what he could barely see, hands tightening at his forearms and nails curling in. And, even if he didn’t say a word, I knew what he saw. He lit a cigarette, but his fingers trembled and he dropped it - among the general spastic brushing off of the smouldering paper, he paused, as if caught in headlights twice his size, rubbed a bit of ash between his fingers, and looked up.

.

 

Insanity, he thought. It must be. He twirled it between his fingers, held it to his lips, rolled it around with his tongue. The word alone seemed elusive: insanity, without sanity, not sane, insane - something his mother’s voice would yell behind the door, insane, you’re _insane._ Who was insane? Was he insane? He couldn’t be. The idea was elusive for him, almost yearned for, pined after. His mental state began to mimic the start of a teen romance novel, with him all ready for some rose-tinted, school-skipping James Dean character to sweep his feet out from under him and leave him bloody, bruised, and out of his mind. Yes, he attended the therapy sessions, yes, he took his medication, but, at the end of the day, he was always there, hands outstretched and ready for his next glimpse of questionable supernatural activity with a mind full of fantasy and a glint in his dull eyes. Insane. Who needed sanity, who wasn’t a doctor or a lawyer or someone with a lot of pressure on their shoulders? Why shouldn’t he have it?

Sometimes he would light a cigarette and set it just so it might burn and he could watch, hand cupped underneath in some faint hope of god only knows. It wasn’t easy to understand what he really waited for when he did that - it wasn’t that anything might come out, a small hand, desperately clawing for his own, or a stream of gold, pure to the karat. Something an insane person would see.

It didn’t take long for him to realize that this did no good. He tried nonetheless. His persistence was admirable, I only wish I could tell him what he did wrong, as he continued in hunching over an ashtray and skimming his fingers around the glass in the hope of catching something’s attention. He began to keep a journal, and when he turned on his music and slipped into his own little world with a notebook and pen, I would come out, so cautiously, to watch.

What a life! He wrote in that illegible, long-stemmed scratch. What a life! I feel something, like something’s coming! And then, underneath, a little drawing of a slender hand, coming out the end of a thin cylinder, then scratched out, then covered with indecipherable scribbles, pen pressed so deep into the page that it would almost rip. I could not help but laugh along. He had started to notice me, eyes lingering in the small spaces that I felt cozy in, offering the twitch of a smile like a cold stream of water as I fluttered my fingers out of his cigarettes. He wanted to find me.

The day he got fired, he laughed and cried until he began to wonder if the shadows around his ceiling would provide him enough of an excuse to not look for another job. This definitely meant he was unstable. Maybe, if he was lucky, they’d just cart him off in a big white car to live the rest of his life in inpatient therapy or something else edgy enough to match his budding passion for early 00’s emo bands.

He started to try different things. Other methods, looking for me like the image of a childhood friend long estranged. A person came into the room once with a ziploc and paper but what they lit up only excited an enveloping cloud of grey, intangible as spoken word. They told him something as they talked and his eyes went a little bigger than usual, and he looked down where I peered from under the chair. I had gotten used to moving around by then, and I moved from the ceiling to beneath the sparse furniture, even in the shade of the plants as long as the window offered no light against their crusting leaves.

When they left, I knew he had an idea. He offered me one of his quiet, lowered smiles, and my being leapt with anticipation. And somehow, I trusted him. I trusted him to take care of me, to feed me, to cultivate me like one might the mind of a small child.

He started to look for help soon afterwards, but I didn’t mind. His blood came out silver, and he liked it as one might a party trick.

I watched him sit, eyes wide and lips ever so slightly parted, as the glitter of his own illusionary divinity trickled over that red skin, and ran all down into the water, amazing, beautiful, shining - I reached down and passed a hand through the water and what a feeling! 

He did it again, then asked me if he might go outside, as if it was my authority to say. I told him, yes.  
.  
The next morning was very grey, like it might’ve rained, but I couldn’t be sure. He woke up late, and very hazy, almost delirious, but yawned and dusted himself off with the intent to write something down - a dream he had, something beautiful about the dark. He got out of the bed, flinging the covers aside with a shower of soft ash that fell around his feet.

The pen trembled against the page. I shone in his eyes as he scratched the whole thing out, then tore out the page and flung it across the room. I can’t create anything! he said. I wondered if that included me. He supposed I was right, although he was still a bit unsure if I was much to be proud of.

“It’s because I stopped taking those silly pills, I bet. That’s why you’re here.”

“You could be right.”  
.

The next time someone came to the door, he did not let them in, out of spite or simply unconcern, I could not tell. It ended up being me that reminded him to water his sad plants, which he did in a slouch, trickling the water in through an old cup he found in the bathroom with a half-hearted complaint.

“They’re dying already,” he growls nearly under his breath, “it’s the light, there isn’t enough.”

“Don’t bother, then.” Fear crept up like a hot flash, making my voice weak and uncommanding. It was not enough. I was always afraid of the light, and he knew it. I was never comfortable where I could be seen, like I was afraid of disappearing somewhere in the polar difference between the room and the sunshine.

He threw open the window nonetheless, without any acknowledgement of my frenzy, and I fled across the room as he stood there in his security, pale face now illuminated so bright I feared it would melt there in front of me. He took in a breath, smiling with a certain sardonic charm as I trembled behind everything and told him no, no, no.

“I don’t like it, I don’t like it.”

I didn’t come out until he closed the window and moved away. He was sorry, he said, many times, and like he meant it. He had forgotten that I preferred the dark, and decided to make it up to me as he cradled me in his arms and bathed in silver until the plants died and his stomach growled from malnourishment. 

 

It was hard to tell if I was happy then, when he took care of me. I felt guilty, if anything. Here we had gone through all the effort to bring me out and now it may not have even been worth it at all. How silly. How _human._ To put out all the effort and then be left regretting that he even started talking to me in the first place. It felt like the cycle was gone, he wasn’t caring about it anymore, and like a factory line everything started rusting and cramping and deteriorating.

He told me I should leave, after that. I almost said yes, if it only would help him, but he never gave me any chance. As any god, he turned cruel before I had the time to detach myself from his pale form.  
.

No, I said, fingers scrabbling at the edge of the cabinet. He let the light in little by little, like he was trying to break it to me softly, but it felt more like slow torture, and I felt like he knew, when he dashed to the window in a burst of passion a few days later and threw both curtains aside with such force his elbow tipped the ashtray from where it sat on the table onto the floor. I started to scream, recoiling from the fire, fleeing across the room where the shadow alleviated the burning all across my body.

He looked at me, those soft grey windows wide in pity but not in worry, not in care, he stood there in his too-baggy clothes, the pallor of his face shimmering in the blinding light, feet still in the ash of his own creation and did not move an inch from that atrocity, that devil, that smug-faced demon, the sun, the effulgent square of all my worst horrors ready to consume what I held in front of me, my body, the one we created.

My body. With the pale skin and the colorless eyes, like a cherub, or a sprite. Was it ever mine? I don’t know, I could say that I had no idea.

Slowly, he turned one foot from where he cowered at the edge of the room and stepped, feet going red from the yellow-bathed floor but not flinching back, not going tense, and reached out his perfect hand into that wash of light like he just might close the curtain.

He did not close it.


End file.
